Samuel Beckett- Abstract Artist in Words…

Today we explored the ways in which Samuel Beckett continues the work of Modernists such as Virginia Woolf (“I want to sink deeper and deeper away from the surface” The Mark on the Wall) and T.S. Eliot (“Words after speech reach into the silence” Four Quartets) in his, Beckett’s quest to bring the art of text into alignment with the art of abstraction. I made the analogy between the early work of expressionist Franz Marc and his later work, which shifted significantly from painting known objects (horses, tigers) into pure abstraction. This is the kind of shift we see in Beckett whose fundamental concern was to find freedom from formal constraints so that his art could approach the transmission or the representation of BEING in its purest form.